IMO that statement is incorrect.
If miners purchased ASIC equipment to solo mine Zcash and Zcash only, then yes they are investor’s. That person spent fiat or cryptocurrency on an item specific to Zcash.
With Zcash originally being CPU then GPU based, it was designed so that anyone with a computer could mine Zcash. No one had to go out and purchase anything, they already had what was needed, this does not make CPU/GPU miners investors.
Even if someone takes out a loan, rents an office space for cheaper electricity vs home rates, this still does not make the miners an investor. Someone worked it out in their head or on a spreadsheet ( ) and saw an opportunity to spend fiat on mining equipment and in return get zec at a ROI that would benefit them. It was a business venture in a speculatory market. Again this does not make a GPU miner an investor.
I’ve spent twenty grand on mining computers and power costs for 12 months straight to mine ZCash exclusively. Call it what you want, but the money was spent to further the goal of this crypto and no others (and to further my own goals, too). Without miners, there is no ZCash.
I might not be an expert on market analysis and investing (but oh wait…maybe I am…isn’t the internets wonderful)…but I’m pretty sure you just defined an “investor” and called it “not an investor”. You even used “ROI”…Return on Investment.
Not to detract from the topic with semantics but an individual investing time, talent, or capital into something is an investor in said something. Nothing good ever comes from blatantly disregarding the interests of your majority investors. Even if someone comes in after mining some other currency (so no new capital investment) they are still investing with monthly electricity and computational power (which is the underlying fundamental value that backs cryptocurrency).
I am no expert on investing neither, and i am no expert on law but whilst you did invest in hardware to mine zcash it doesn’t make you an investor in zcash company with voting rights regardless of what you think of yourself. It’s somewhat similar to buying an iPhone and thinking that you are investor in Apple, having rights to decide what they do with their company and their products. You can voice your opinion like everyone else but that’s about it.
I was being a little snarky because Citric and I know each other. This actually is my area of expertise.
No one said anything about rights. This is not a security (at least not yet in the US) we are not talking about company ownership. We are talking about people who invest time, talent, or resources into something. That, by definition, is an investor.
Your example of an iphone isn’t relevant because it’s a customer purchasing a consumer good sold by the company. However, someone who hosts their pod casts on iTunes is one such investor we are talking about as they are investing their time and talent in the company’s product.
If Apple decided to do something that would exclude a majority group of their podcast contributors from using their systems, you can bet your rear-end the stock would drop and adoption of that service would drop also.
Now why that is relevant for this discussion: because the equivalent here would be the value of the cryptocurrency.
Honestly, this couldn’t happen at a worse time in my opinion. With the June/July spike right around the corner, I can’t see any way that this could positively contribute to the value. August would have been a better time.
Yeah, maybe my example of buying an iPhone was bad, better would be making an iPhone and getting paid for doing that. By making an iPhone you are no investor, although you invested you time and effort into making it. Same with mining zcash, you invested in that but you also got paid for it. Why would you have anymore say about the future of zcash as a coin than someone who is paid to make an iPhone about future of Apples products?
That’s a much deeper rabbit hole, but the short of it is because the success of the “product” virtually always depends on people investing in some way towards that product. Even our time spent debating this on the forums is a positive investment of time which ZEC benefits from (by showing an active and dedicated community) and in turn we benefit from with higher adoption, volume, and market price. It is a symbiotic relationship and it applies to miners also (probably more blatantly than my example above).
And specific to your point…feedback on products is VERY important to campanies like Apple. And those who ignore majority groups of “investors” suffer for it.
But I do like badgers, and mushrooms! :-p Do you think I should suggest it to @zooko?
Seriously, I love the playfulness of the Ethereum community and think that we could learn from it in our presentation. (The event in the video was organised by Ethereum people with some participation from Omise Go people.)
24 hour volume @ $24.5m?!! most fascinating thing to me is zcash gets listed on 2 new exchanges, then loses half our volume. normally one would figure our volume would at least rise slightly …weird!
) and saw an opportunity to spend fiat on mining equipment and in return get zec at a ROI that would benefit them. It was a business venture in a speculatory market. Again this does not make a GPU miner an investor.